Hunger, Heaven, and Hell

It's possible to worship God when you are afraid. But in fretfulness, I find it hard to pray. My dread can suffocate my prayer. I’m not proud of that. This humbles me before those who have a steel-hard spiritual strength that I lack. It forces me to reckon my own sin in one of its shapes, fear. Judge me or don't. Your call.

It’s possible to worship God when you are hungry. I have worshiped in hunger and thirst. But in those times I had chosen to be hungry and thirsty. It may be that hunger creates in the poor such dread that, like me in fretfulness, they find it hard to pray. And hunger alone might come between creator and creature. To be hungry is to be in danger of losing sight of God. Judge the hungry or don’t. Your call.

I don't have children. So my ability to worship while my daughter groans in her sleep for lack of food is entirely hypothetical. So I cannot judge the man with a hungry daughter who cannot lift his eyes to God.

This is a beautiful prayer, the beauty of which I would not wish on anyone:

     My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
        Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?
     O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer;
        and by night, but find no rest. [Psalm 22:1-2 (NRSV).]


1. Helping the rich, hurting the poor.

That prayer might soon be the anthem of many hearts among America’s poor. An element of the House of Representatives has killed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps).

But they gave billions of dollars to Big Agribusiness – $195 billion over 10 years.


2. Hurt has its reasons.

Many if not most of these members of Congress confess Christ. So I am enjoined from hating them. But if I could ask them a question, it would be this: Congressmen, how do you beautify helping the rich and hurting the poor? What is the biblical lipstick you put on your legislative pig? Is it Matthew 13:12?

For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. [NRSV]

I would say, Jesus did not mean that men and women of power in our time should add to corporations’ fleets of jets at the same time that they put discount bakery-remainders above the grasp of a poor family. Jesus was talking about understanding.

I would urge them, Get that; that is a prayer my for you: get understanding. Your authority is greater than mine, but I will seek it, too.

3. Hearing from heaven and hell.
I am unlikely ever to be among members of Congress, such that we could share what we know about God. But in my place and time, I might share my ideas with Christian men and women who might share such ideas back at me.

And when two or three are gathered in his name, Jesus is there. I hope he brings Lazarus, from his parable, who was poor, who had sores that dogs licked, who did not get even crumbs from the rich man’s table, who’s door he starved at. Lazarus suffered in his lifetime, but now he gets every good thing in heaven. And maybe Lazarus will pray his own gospel story into the hearts and minds of we who speak together about hunger. Lazarus stands for the poor and desperate in Jesus’s Palestinian days and in our present time.

But if Jesus does not bring Lazarus, maybe he will bring up from hell the other character in that parable – the rich man, who did not love Lazarus, who did not help him, who suffers now, who suffers unbearable thirst, who will suffer forever. Maybe, from the rich man’s mouth, in which lack of spittle makes his mucous congeal into tiny, sharp pebbles, he will rasp a warning not to enjoy our prosperity as if God had prospered us only for ourselves. Not that Jesus wants the rich to have less; he wants the poor to have more. He wants them not to be hungry.


4. Where Jesus will be.

After food stamps are cut off, if that is the final outcome, Jesus will be in America. Jesus will be among the poor, just as he was among the poor of Israel two-thousand years ago. In that time, he did not enter a palace until it was time to die.

And for every man, woman, and child who suffers, Jesus will know their suffering as if it were his own. It will be his own. When we afflict the poor, we afflict Christ. Isn't that revealed in the nature of a brother, a father, who loves perfectly?


5.  Prayer.

Jesus, pray Lazarus into our hearts. Amen.

Crimes of the Imagination

The recent Republican nominating convention had both too much imagination and too little.

1. Too much imagination

There was too much imagination in this sense: the whole convention responded to an imaginary Barack Obama sitting in a chair, an imaginary Obama that holds opinions and does things that the real Obama doesn’t.

For example, a major theme of the convention was that Obama is against small businesses. A fifty-dollar bill with the face of Draco Mulfoy has as much verity as that claim. It ignores Obama’s support for small businesses – like his administration’s loan program for small businesses. This canopy of a theme of the Republican convention came from X-Acto knifing certain words in a certain Obama speech. These words were picked away from the words that came before and after. The claim was not honest.

2. Too little imagination.

But there was also a lack of imagination.

I didn’t see most of the convention, but I trust conservative columnist David Brooks when he says that testimonies there about the compassion of Mitt Romney were moving. So let’s accept that Romney is a compassionate man.

Then how can he link himself by his selection of his running mate to the extreme part of his party that wants to cut away the social safety net? How can he in that way link himself to the members of his party who, as Bill Maher says, want poor people to find their food in the woods?

Mr. Romeny appears to have compassion for persons who stand in front of him, persons he knows. If someone he knew were hungry, he would probably feed that person. If they were sick, he might try to find a way to get them cured.

But if that person is not in front of him, if he doesn’t know them, then he seems unable to imagine the harm he would do by, say, stopping the government food-stamp program. And he can’t imagine the death or bankruptcy that would come with the end of Obamacare.

Make no mistake: without food stamps, people will go hungry. In fact, even with that program, people live in America who are, in sterile social-science speak, "food insecure". Without that program, children will be stunted in their growth. Without that program, adults will die. Particularly the elderly. Particularly the sick.

People will steal to survive. People will pilfer to fill their children’s mouths. Some of them will get caught, get prosecuted, get convicted. With the stigma of a criminal conviction, their ability to feed themselves and their children will be more dire than it was before.

If Obamacare is repealed, people who give birth to children with birth defects will go bankrupt saving their children. That’s because insurance companies won’t sell health insurance for a baby born with a "preexisting condition." The baby’s parents will have to choose between going bankrupt paying for medical care or buying their baby’s coffin. And they might both go bankrupt and bury their baby.

If Romney could imagine this, maybe his compassion would not permit him to allow it. But he can’t or won’t imagine it. So he has embraced the social-Darwinists of his party. He has (literally) embraced the Paul Ryans who claim they want to "free" poor people from dependence on government. This is the freedom to starve. This is the freedom to die. Imagine it, if you can.

So far as I know, no soldier in American history has chosen to put himself in harm's way for the freedom to go hungry. It isn’t much of a freedom. There’s got to be a balance that permits essential freedoms, but which doesn’t convert us to some kind of Dickensian dystopia.

3. Failure of imagination: it couldn’t happen here.

There’s another potential failure of imagination. That’s the failure of the imagination of the electorate. That’s the electorate that might select Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan in November.

We human beings typically have a hard time imagining a radical change from what is. I suspect that that’s one reason that a prophet like Jeremiah could prophecy that his countrymen would be reduced to literally eating their own sons and daughters, but the reaction of those countrymen was something like, Yeah, whatever.

This lack of imagination affects us today. There is not now mass starvation. So we can’t imagine mass starvation among us through the policies of a major American political party. The image and idea of mass starvation in America seem incredible, the product of a severe fever, not careful thought.

We often can’t imagine a future without a social safety net, even though it is a marquee idea of the Republican Party. And even if we imagine the dynamiting of our dams that hold back hunger, we can’t imagine the flood of suffering that will flow from that policy.

The practices of our compassionate government rose from the suffering of The Great Depression. The potential repeal of those practices comes at a time when few men and women live who remember the time that gave birth to them. This is probably not coincidental. Perhaps the practices will die with living memory of their reasons.

4. Imagining a worse possibility.

Or it might be worse than that. It might be that small-government conservatism is so appealing that it makes mass suffering tolerable to many people.

Ayn Rand has many disciples, and she despised compassion. In a time before he chameleoned himself to blend with compassionate stage-scenery in Tampa, Paul Ryan compelled new employees to read Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand would have kicked into the gutter poor Lazarus, the beggar who Jesus spoke of. The only thing that might have stopped her is if he were already in the gutter. Certainly, she would not have lifted him out of the gutter. She would not have bound up his sores. She would not have given him bread.

(The parable of the rich man and Lazarus is at Luke 16:19-31.)

5. This election.

Imagine a parable of a man beset, not by bandits, but by hunger. Or ill health. Or lack of education. Imagine a priest and a Levite and a small-government conservative who cross the road to avoid that helpless man. (Luke 10:30-37.) Who will be the good Samaritan to help him?

This election is a choice between the candidates who want to cross the road and the candidates who want to help. Imagine the difference that the election of one side versus the other will make. Literally: please imagine it. Because elections have consequences, and this election will make a difference in hunger and in health and in education and in prosperity.

Prayer: Lord, your word says that as iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another. Let it be so in this debate. And if anyone’s imagination is stimulated by this piece, perhaps their prayers will be, too – including their prayers for me, which I covet, to make my own imagination pleasing to you.